The Throne of Magic
by Oran Titanrider
Summary: Magic is withering away. Wizard City is no more. Bartleby is dying. Ravenwood is fractured. Who will help the Spiral in its time of need?


**Prologue: Sunflare Legion 22**

"Let us thank Lady Judgment's guidance for this victory," Tanis said, kicking over the dead guard's corpse.

Kane stood numbly across from his captain, the surreal glow of the waterfall eclipsing him into a distorted silhouette. For some odd reason, this place reminded him of home. The walls curved broadly around the palace, extending out in an arc that almost seemed to leer down onto him, as if it held a shadowy gaze.

His mother picked out a house just like this. _Maybe they're the same._

He stroked his chin, his catatonic glare buried into the glazed marble floors purely reflecting the polished icy gleam coming from the sconces.

After all, mother always did have a great taste of architecture. He remembered well her paintings of cities and castles, where she stashed up in the attic, occasionally taking them down from time to time for seasonal touch.

His reminiscence cracked a frown on his face. Mother had died a while ago, though.

The shadows of the ceiling haunted him. They seemed to have no bound, no realistic barrier to them that made this place seem hospitable. And they lingered in the utmost corners of the palace, where the curvature of the columns and walls created a mismatching space which tendrils of black seemed to meander. He was afraid creatures might crawl out from them, as if they were portals to the underworld, a gateway between two domains.

"Sir Kane?"

He blinked. Captain Tanis stood before him, plate-mail shimmering his jade eyes and hanging blonde hair. "Are you feeling all right?"

The beautiful waterfall kindled only half of Kane's grin, accenting his violet eyes into two pools of amethyst oceans and defining the shadows cast over his face from the tautness of his jaw. "Yeah. Just lost in thought. My apologies, Captain."

"You should retire to your bed chambers. Or maybe get acquainted with the place. It'll probably be the last stop before _Kanded's Straight_."

Kane flinched at the name. It was the fabled strip of land that haunted all his dreams. Only with a width of about four feet or so, it was a thin, three-hundred foot-long bridge that connected the snow-clad fields of Wintertusk to the mountainous taiga of Grizzleheim. Made of ice.

Tanis wanted to march Legion Sunflare out across the bridge. It was the fastest way to make it to Northguard, and Kane understood his intention, but the idea had its fallacies. For one, the bridge borders a giant cliff to one side. They would be exposed to a full-out ambush. Secondly, nobody even knew if the bridge would have the strength to carry a battalion of hive-hundred knights across.

He had this conversation with the captain already multiple times before. Tanis explained it quite reasonably, though to no considerable persuasiveness. "This pass is the only way that heads toward Northguard. Otherwise, we'd have to take the caravan road to the Pearled Gates, guarded by Giants, Colossuses, Wyverns, and who knows what else Ymir has brought upon this ill-forsaken ice land," he had said one day previously, "This would be our only chance of a possible safe passage to Northguard."

Kane disagreed completely. What made him feel better was the fact that Tanis wasn't appointed as captain for his sensibility. He wasn't even appointed because he was superior in leadership skills. He was anointed Captain of the 22nd Legion because he was able to wield magic – a rare feat only few humans possessed now-a-days. He couldn't even cast magic that well, only small bursts of fire from time to time, but it was more than any of the other Knights could produce.

Kane understood the rank system as such: you had different levels of command who could govern different magnitudes of magic. That's how they played it – at least for Legion Sunflare. The higher up in rank you were, the easier it was for you to wield magic. The Legion as a whole was governed by the Knight-Commander Damion Levroth, who was said to be able to conjure dragons upon word, and meteor showers upon whim. Then there were the ancient Warlocks who resided in the upper bureaucratic Councils to help govern the Pyromesian Empire, who were the last of the remaining Pyromancers left in the whole Spiral.

"Magic surrounds us," the Captain said, when trying to explain it to Kane one day. "We breathe it. Feel it. Live it. It courses through your very veins, even if you don't know it."

Unfortunately, his private lessons with Kane to sate frequent curiosities about the aptness of man to cast magic went awry. Kane couldn't do as much as make candlelight flare. And he thought he was doing that only from the motion of his hand when it swept across the candle, blowing the flames erect.

Tanis explained that one had to open a whole new mental and physical register in order to perform magic. "It's weird," he'd say, "You have to breathe in very deeply, filling up your diaphragm. From there is your foundation to magic. From there you can access the hole to where you can cast your magic through."

Kane got headaches from practicing. Nights over he would practice by himself, trying to rehearse the correct breathing techniques, or trying to better understand and feel what this "hole" – through which magic was supposed to flow through – was. But, alas, he would fail every time.

He was never told the full story behind the decrease of magic, but he knew it had to do something with the Grandfather Tree, Bartleby, slowly dying. Something had happened to him that made the flow of magic ebb away, falling free from the careful teachings that man possessed so long ago.

He also heard that a great wizard – the best even – had mysteriously disappeared many years back. He couldn't fully remember the name, but he thought he knew part. _Ambrose? Was it Ambrose?_ He shook his head. _Maybe not… ugh, I have a horrible memory._ Nonetheless, with him gone, situations in the Spiral didn't get any better.

He only knew that because of this endangerment of magic, havens and institutions that taught magic became non-existent and archaic. The Schools of Magic in Ravenwood – more specifically – transformed, not to be schools anymore, but factions that strived to stick together in the emphasis of tradition.

Thus Kingdoms were created; Empires built on the sole purpose of trying to retrieve this "lost" magic for the revival of the "Golden" era. Old rival schools eventually became blood-bound enemies, who blamed the other for the cause of this stoppage of magic.

With this creation of separate factions, Wizard City withered away. With no guardian or protector, it soon became the main war grounds surfeited with blood and corpses. The city, from the catastrophe of its own tumult, was razed to the ground. Bartleby was the only thing that survived.

Legion Sunflare was but a military branch of the Pyromesian Empire, which built itself from the ashes of near-extinct pyromancers who pilgrimaged to the depths of Dragonspyre. It was the Legions' duty to further protect the citizens of Pyromesia from invading factions, extend the borders of their beloved empire, and investigate the disappearance of magic.

Legion 22's mission specifically – which involved Kane, led by Captain Tanis – was to reinforce their outpost at Northguard and Nidavellir, in hopes to find some ancient hieroglyphic they could encrypt that helped explained the cataclysmic dearth of magic in the Spiral, and defend both areas from other factions – especially the Arctic Circle, a hierarchy of old Thaumaturges gone barbarian and ruthless, who took their tribes deep in the forest thick of Grizzleheim.

Kane pulled at the chainmail wrung round his neck. All this thinking gave him a headache.

"Are you sure you're alright?" Tanis repeated, after several minutes of observing Kane's contemplation. He almost forgot he was there.

"Yeah… I think I just need some rest," picking up his posture, Kane turned back toward the split staircase that rounded the impeding waterfall in between, letting his golden-tipped spear drag behind him, clanking, as he ascended to the bed chambers.

He had a feeling these last few nights were going to be sleepless.


End file.
